By Virginia Winder
My blogging may have gone off the boil, but my training hasn't.
Went biking for more than an hour yesterday, the day before I went for an even longer walk and ended up running and on wild-wind Saturday did a gym workout.
Have decided that I need an indoor alternative when it's just too nasty out there. Also bought some long lycra tights that will help when winter sets in, because I refuse to be a fair-weather athlete. Wind, however, does put cycling off the schedule for safety reasons.
I have been clocking up the hours and the kilometres on our roads, parks and streets, have been walking to work and have added a sign by the lift on my stairs. It reads: "No Virginia, use the stairs."
Why? Because I need to reprogramme myself. "I'm not going to use the lift today," I announced to my floor at Puke Ariki.
Thirty seconds later, I pushed the button and was rising mechanically to the next floor like an automaton. The sign changed that.
Today, I noticed I've slipped again so the sign will have to go back up again tomorrow, much to the amusement of my work colleagues.
You see, I'm trying to be extremly active in my daily life and have been trying even harder on the food front.
Every now and then I find myself slipping into bad habits, like buying iced coffee. No, not the stuffed with cream and icecream kind, but the type you get from the dairy in a plastic bottle. Not a sensible choice.
Better to make a cup of tea and have some fresh fruit and nuts, to sustain me through an afternoon.
Have been doing some research on low-carbohydrate diets and while they work for losing weights, you do have to be careful what protein you eat. Check out this story, I wrote using research from Harvard University.
Now, here's another confession - I haven't got the work-life balance thing going so well.
Have had some days where I have been back to my old appalling habits of working 13 hours.
Don't for a second think that's a good thing.
It's not admirable. It's obsessive, self-centred and unhealthy on all fronts.
I've still managed to fit in training sessions on those days, but nothing else. I've been exhausted and it's my poor family that misses out.
So from this moment on that stops.
Oh, I sound so serious, so earnest!
It's all so much fun though, this exercise journey. The joy of it! The freedom of biking, the flying of running, the meditation of swimming...
Last night, I was biking along the walkway, the rolling Tasman Sea on my right and the snow-dusted Mt Taranaki on my left and, like a crazy woman, I yelled at the top of my voice: "I love this life!"
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